


One Strike And You're Out

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 14:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3137681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha and Peggy would have respected each other. Steve appreciates them both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Strike And You're Out

            Natasha doesn’t ask to be told about Peggy. She’s there at closing time at the boxing gym Steve Rogers (Iraq veteran, startling Obama voter, secret artist and Constitution geek, half-lies and half-truths, but he welcomes the paycheck and the feeling of everyday responsibility) works for, and while Captain America locks up Black Widow lounges against a wall and waits. In her stillness and her carefully chosen words, she reminds him of Peggy, even though physically they are opposites.

 

            Natasha is rather shorter; her face is rounded with a pointed chin where Peggy’s was almost squared, strong-jawed. Both women have curly hair, but there’s the obvious difference in tone, and then there’s something more indefinable, something about the way Natasha holds herself, that means that Steve has never mistaken her for Peggy, not once. Not even in the night when he wakes, gasping for breath, because he was chosen for his heart and the choice has come back to haunt him: he can’t forget a single one of the men he has lost, the civilians he has failed to save. Natasha is there in his bed and Peggy never was, but Steve dreamed that she was often enough, and Peggy had to wake him often enough, that confusion is just possible – except that there’s that _difference_ , that self-effacing way of holding herself she has, an ever-present shadow. Peggy was an Army officer. She was there to be noticed and obeyed, no matter how many people she had to deck and how often she had to bawl herself hoarse to achieve that. Natasha is obeyed, when she uncoils herself from the shadows and steps into the open, but people fear her in a way they never feared Peggy. Peggy would blast you to ashes, but she would stand before you to do it, and Natasha would simply slip into your shadow and knife you so quietly you’d never know till you dropped that you were dying.

 

            Once, she would have repulsed Steve.

 

            Steve has grown to appreciate efficiency, and silence, and what can be achieved in the shadows. And though people always forget it – although Steve always allows them to forget it – for him, the war wasn’t always dancing with chorus girls and punching Hitler. He went on his fair share of – <i>black ops</i>, one of the ex-Army boxers as the gym calls them, and watches Steve carefully as he does so. Secrets, Steve calls them. He feels his simpler term is more accurate.

 

             Natasha asks him once if he reminds her of Peggy. She’s wearing a red dress, vintage, and maybe she can see something in his eyes that warns her of his memories. Her voice is cool, without judgement, but Steve knows that if he gives the wrong answer, they’ll never be quite the same. She won’t leave him, she’ll still come to him when she wants him, but there’ll always be detachment, and never friendship.

 

            “Sometimes you do,” he says, trying to tell the truth, because that’s all he knows how to do. “It’s – you both value your integrity. You take yourself, and your actions, seriously. You’re both serious people.” He shrugged. “But that’s really all.”

 

             “You’re a serious person yourself, aren’t you, Captain Rogers,” she says, and the danger is past, she’s teasing him.

 

            “Only sometimes,” he says, and takes off her red dress.

 

            Maybe that’s what she had in mind in the first place. But she’s Natasha, so he’ll never know.

           


End file.
